Azure News 2017 – Week 33

Post navigation

Two new Azure Regions in Australia, Azure Event Grid and Microsoft aquires Cycle Computing in Azure News as heard on the latest Need to Know podcast, episode 161.

Two new Azure regions announced for Australia Canberra Data Centres

Now 42 Azure regions announced, thanks to a partnership in Canberra with Canberra Data Centres.

The Canberra Data Centres:

currently support more than 40 federal government departments and agencies, the ACT Government, and we are now supporting a number of managed service providers and smaller cloud service providers delivering to government

their first 6 Megawatt data centre, designed to serve the needs of the Federal Government, opened in Hume in 2008

they are connected by a 2 terabytes per second Intra Government Communications Network (ICON) which ensures high speed, low latency and cost effective, secure cloud connections.

Three years ago, Microsoft opened our first Australian Azure cloud regions in Melbourne and Sydney, however the benefits of Canberra will go far beyond the boundaries of Canberra, with federal, state and local Government, as well as Commercial organisations, standing to benefit from these new Azure regions.

There is also a network which intertwines the sensitive government agencies called GovLink, it means that any data destined between agencies is completely secure. For example, when an email is sent out of a government agency like the defence department to another government agency, based on the TO address, the firewall at each agency intercepts the network packets. If the email is for another government agency, the email is routed not over the internet, but directly over this separate private link called GovLink straight to the other government agency. It means that external email is secure. It is also means that with the introduction of the two new Azure government data centers in Canberra, with Office 365, every client device at every every government department will have a secure connection to the Exchange server over a secure HTTPS connection and email to other Exchange Online government tenants in the same datacenter will not leave the datacenter, so will essentially replace GovLink.

The two new regions in Canberra will be available in the first half of 2018, through a strategic partnership with Australian company Canberra Data Centres. With this partnership, our intent is to be the first and only hyperscale cloud provider to serve the needs of government for data classified at both Unclassified level as well as a higher classification called ‘Protected’ – the first tier of national security classified data.

Introducing Azure Event Grid

Most modern applications are built using events:

reacting to changes coming from IoT devices

responding to user clicks on mobile apps

initiating business processes from customer requests

With the growth of event-based programming, there is an increased focus on serverless platforms, like Azure Functions, a serverless compute engine, and Azure Logic Apps, a serverless workflow orchestration engine. These services enable you to focus on your application without worrying about any infrastructure, provisioning, or scaling.

We are making event-based and serverless applications even easier to build on Azure. Azure Event Grid is a fully-managed event routing service and the first of its kind. Azure Event Grid greatly simplifies the development of event-based applications and simplifies the creation of serverless workflows. Using a single service, Azure Event Grid manages all routing of events from any source, to any destination, for any application.

It’s all about event based reactive programming throughout all of Azure natively. Currently you need to a lot of polling with Azure, for example checking every ‘X’ amount of minutes, now with Event hubs, if you need to react to something, Azure simply just let’s you know – taps you on your shoulder – which you can then incorporate the event into something like Azure Functions or Logic Apps. At the Azure Event Grid go live, the support will be for Blob storage, resource groups, subscriptions, event hubs & custom topics.

As an example, anything that happens within a resource group like a new resource that has popped up in the resource group, you can now do stuff to reactively tag the resource.

As an example, you can have event grid as the trigger for a Logic App, in which the event grid listens for any changes to a subscription.

Event Grid is run on top of Azure Service Fabric where all the micro services run.

Azure has acquired Cycle Computing

We’ve acquired Cycle Computing, a leader in cloud computing orchestration, to help make it easier than ever for customers to use High-Performance Computing (HPC) and other Big Computing capabilities in the cloud. The cloud is quickly changing the world of Big Compute, giving customers the on-demand power and infrastructure necessary to run massive workloads at scale without the overhead. Compute power is no longer measured or limited by the square footage of a data center.

Azure has a massive global footprint and more than any other major cloud provider. It also has powerful infrastructure & fast networking with InfiniBand support and state-of-the-art GPU capabilities. Combining this with Cycle Computing’s technology and years of experience with the world’s largest supercomputers, there will be many new possibilities.

Cycle Computing will help customers accelerate their movement to the cloud.